Nobody spoke for a long minute.
It was nothing less than a catastrophe, in the dead of an Arctic winter and in a game-abandoned land, to lose their grub.
They were not panic-stricken, but they were busy looking the situation squarely in the face and considering.
Joe Hines was the first to speak.
"We can pan the snow for the beans and rice... though there wa'n't more'n eight or ten pounds of rice left."
"And somebody will have to take a team and pull for Sixty Mile," Daylight said next.
"I'll go," said Finn.
They considered a while longer.
"But how are we going to feed the other team and three men till he gets back?"
Hines demanded.
"Only one thing to it," was Elijah's contribution.
"You'll have to take the other team, Joe, and pull up the Stewart till you find them Indians.
Then you come back with a load of meat.
You'll get here long before Henry can make it from Sixty Mile, and while you're gone there'll only be Daylight and me to feed, and we'll feed good and small."
"And in the morning we-all'll pull for the cache and pan snow to find what grub we've got." Daylight lay back, as he spoke, and rolled in his robe to sleep, then added:
"Better turn in for an early start.
Two of you can take the dogs down.
Elijah and me'll skin out on both sides and see if we-all can scare up a moose on the way down."
CHAPTER VIII
No time was lost.
Hines and Finn, with the dogs, already on short rations, were two days in pulling down.
At noon of the third day Elijah arrived, reporting no moose sign.
That night Daylight came in with a similar report.
As fast as they arrived, the men had started careful panning of the snow all around the cache.
It was a large task, for they found stray beans fully a hundred yards from the cache.
One more day all the men toiled.
The result was pitiful, and the four showed their caliber in the division of the few pounds of food that had been recovered.
Little as it was, the lion's share was left with Daylight and Elijah.
The men who pulled on with the dogs, one up the Stewart and one down, would come more quickly to grub.
The two who remained would have to last out till the others returned.
Furthermore, while the dogs, on several ounces each of beans a day, would travel slowly, nevertheless, the men who travelled with them, on a pinch, would have the dogs themselves to eat.
But the men who remained, when the pinch came, would have no dogs.
It was for this reason that Daylight and Elijah took the more desperate chance.
They could not do less, nor did they care to do less.
The days passed, and the winter began merging imperceptibly into the Northland spring that comes like a thunderbolt of suddenness. It was the spring of 1896 that was preparing.
Each day the sun rose farther east of south, remained longer in the sky, and set farther to the west.
March ended and April began, and Daylight and Elijah, lean and hungry, wondered what had become of their two comrades.
Granting every delay, and throwing in generous margins for good measure, the time was long since passed when they should have returned.
Without doubt they had met with disaster.
The party had considered the possibility of disaster for one man, and that had been the principal reason for despatching the two in different directions.
But that disaster should have come to both of them was the final blow.
In the meantime, hoping against hope, Daylight and Elija eked out a meagre existence.
The thaw had not yet begun, so they were able to gather the snow about the ruined cache and melt it in pots and pails and gold pans.
Allowed to stand for a while, when poured off, a thin deposit of slime was found on the bottoms of the vessels.
This was the flour, the infinitesimal trace of it scattered through thousands of cubic yards of snow.
Also, in this slime occurred at intervals a water-soaked tea-leaf or coffee-ground, and there were in it fragments of earth and litter.
But the farther they worked away from the site of the cache, the thinner became the trace of flour, the smaller the deposit of slime.
Elijah was the older man, and he weakened first, so that he came to lie up most of the time in his furs.
An occasional tree-squirrel kept them alive.
The hunting fell upon Daylight, and it was hard work.